Editorial Calendar is one of my favorite plugins for my personal blog and my 9-to-5 company’s B2B blog because it enables me to visualize my posting schedule. Once installed, a link will appear in the Posts section of your WordPress’ left rail that will take you to the calendar. There you’ll be able to create drafts or schedule posts (though you’ll probably want to go into the posts before they publish so you can work on the keywords, links, and formatting).

At my 9-to-5, we have multiple authors working on the blog, so this makes it easy to see what dates everything can be scheduled, helping to align clusters of posts into a sort of narrative. For my personal blog, I can see all the blank spaces and (sometimes) be shamed into being more productive with my content creation. But that’s not why I originally installed Editorial Calendar.

When I was writing Seeking Carol Lee, a story with three overlapping points of view, I needed help visualizing the plot points where my characters interacted. Where had they been? What events transpired before they met? I had to get their head spaces right. And I had to make sure I wasn’t claiming someone was working on a Sunday or some “trivial” oversight like that.

In the Screen Options, you can set Author, Status, Time of Day, and the number of weeks you’ll want to see at once, ranging from one to eight. The default of three usually suits my needs. A simple button brings up any saved drafts that haven’t received a date yet.

Editorial is a free WordPress plugin and, as of this post, was updated three months ago.